Greg Rybarczyk’s ESPN Home Run Tracker is measuring dinger distances at levels of accuracy that are unprecedented — using physics

At Petco Park and other baseball meccas around the country, the singular event of a home run continues to enthrall in more ways than one.

There is the wonder in observing an elite display of power.

Then there is the measuring.

“Fans,” said Greg Rybarczyk, “really, really love to know how far a home run goes.”

No fan loves to know more than Rybarczyk. The lifelong Boston Red Sox supporter and former physics instructor created ESPN Home Run Tracker, a tool housed at
hittrackeronline.com that is logging dinger distances at unprecedented levels of accuracy.

What began as a one-man, in-house operation has grown into a popular collaboration with the ESPN Stats & Information Group. While Major League Baseball clubs provide in-game estimates of long-ball flights at their home ballparks, Rybarczyk’s invention is now considered the authoritative word on baseball’s most elusive statistic.

In past times, that statistic could be downright fabricated.

Take the Ruthian knock that then-Red Sox slugger Manny Ramirez launched in June 2001 at Fenway Park. After the ball clanged off the left-field light tower, the home run was estimated at 501 feet “out of deference to Ted Williams’s 502-foot shot in 1946,” as then-beat reporter Chris Snow wrote in The Boston Globe in April 2005.

Not coincidentally, Snow was writing about a game, four years after that memorable shot, in which Ramirez walloped a ball that cleared the same tower. The distance, however, was not provided. The Red Sox PR department, apparently embarrassed by backlash against past exaggerations, had ceased estimating home run distances.

Rybarczyk was taken aback.

“I thought, ‘That’s ridiculous,’ ” Rybarczyk recalled. “Here we are in the 21st century, we put a man on the moon, and they can’t calculate how far a baseball traveled.”

Inspiration had come to Rybarczyk, who spent seven years in the U.S. Navy aboard a ship as a navigator and nuclear engineer. Within a week, he had constructed a working prototype that incorporated all the forces acting on a flying baseball — gravity, wind resistance and spin.

By timing Ramirez’s April 2005 shot to the point where it left the park and plotting the exact location of that point, Rybarczyk discovered he could project the rest of the ball’s flight path. That resulted in a distance of 449 feet — still a prodigious blast, though well short of Williams-esque legend.

Rybarczyk didn’t stop there. His interest piqued, he set about creating diagrams of all 30 MLB ballparks, with the intent to provide an accurate distance for every home run.

From August 2005 until Opening Day in 2006, Rybarczyk said, he “worked probably three to four hours a night, almost every night,” preparing the launch of a website titled “Hit Tracker.”

“The one thing I can say really worked to my favor is, I apparently don’t need as much sleep as most people,” said Rybarczyk, a Massachusetts native who lives in Oregon, where he is, by day, a process architect. “After my wife and kids got to sleep, that’s really when highlight videos on
MLB.com were becoming available.”